


Snake In The Garden

by fadeverb



Series: Mortal Lives [6]
Category: In Nomine
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-28
Updated: 2013-08-28
Packaged: 2017-12-24 22:48:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/945587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadeverb/pseuds/fadeverb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Malena had no one left in her life, until someone fell into her garden.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snake In The Garden

I was hanging laundry in the back of the house, on the lines strung between the pila and the garden, when a woman tumbled over the wall. She hit the cement hard. Like a dropped basket of groceries. Red streaked the ground about her as she staggered to her feet and absurdly, my first thought was, _She's ruined a tomato._ Except a squashed tomato is not that color of red, and she was dripping with it.

She ran past me, weaving like a drunk, right through my garden. Smashed flowers and broken stems. She made a leap for the next wall, and I can only imagine that adrenaline would let a woman bleeding in that way come so near to going over the top. Except she only grabbed the top of the wall, hands clutching over the broken glass embedded there, and promptly dropped back down. A crumpled heap of limbs and wide, terrified eyes in the midst of my flowers.

I don't know what sound I made, except that she rolled over to stare at me, and said, "Please. Help me. They'll kill me."

It has been years since people were dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, disappeared into prisons no one knows where, missing people that no one would acknowledge, but I remembered my own childhood well enough--and what adults said then, what adults said now--to know that _years ago_ is never the same as _won't ever again_. I flung my basket of wet laundry over her, and turned to face the wall she'd come from.

An instant later, a man came over the same wall. Dark clothes, dark eyes, and he could not hide the knife in his hand. He stared at me for a moment, then said, "Did you see--"

I pointed to the smear on the wall behind me. "And who," I asked, "will pay for my flowers, and my ruined laundry?"

He did not dignify that with a response. He flung himself over the wall in a single impossible motion, and he was deft enough to not leave new blood behind on any of the glass shards.

When I could not hear his footsteps any longer, I dragged the woman into the house.

She was all bones, taller than me and thinner, like a telenovela star or a model, and she was much harder to carry than a basket of wet laundry. Faced with the prospect of pulling her upstairs, with the fear of that man _coming back_ when he could find no more traces of her passage or blood, I set her up in the pantry. No windows, but enough space on the floor that I could spread out a heap of blankets, an old sheet over them, and lay her down there with a pillow under her head. Her black hair spread out around her like an inverse halo, and her eyes lay closed all through this process.

I bound her wounds as best I could, and put on water for coffee.

There was a moment when I thought about it. Calling for an ambulance, sending her off to the hospital. Letting this not be my problem. That would have been a sensible, adult approach to the matter. But my husband always said I was not sensible, not an adult, not _rational_ enough, and perhaps he was right. My grandmother, carrying a picture of her son, an uncle I never met, clutched to her chest, had told me that you could not simply sit back and let it be _not your problem_. That was how they got you. Turn your face away and pull a pillow over your head at what sounds and lights came from the neighbor's house. Pretend you see nothing, rather than showing your fear. Let everyone fend for themselves.

And my grandmother would say, after blowing out a breath of smoke, let those sons of whores fear us, granddaughter. For they have the guns and the boots and the noises in the night, but we are many, and we will survive.

The woman on the floor of my pantry seemed like a survivor.

I had consumed three cups of coffee and torn a bread roll into tiny, nervous shreds that I could not bring myself to eat when a knock came on the door. I opened it up to see the man from before, no sign of a knife on him. "Pardon me," he said. "But I need to ask. Are you sure that woman went over the wall of your garden?"

I burst into tears. My mother taught me that trick when I was very young, and I have never forgotten it. There are many things it cannot protect a woman against, she said, but many men will believe anything you say that they already wish to believe if you cry when you say it. Only never use this against a man who wishes to be cruel. It will only make things worse.

"I was so afraid," I said. "She told me to say that. She hid in my house. She used my shower and my towels, there's blood everywhere, and she said that if I told anyone she would hurt me."

He made flustered soothing motions with his hands, as if he meant to pat me on the shoulder but wasn't sure if that might make me cry harder. "Do you know where she went?"

"I don't know," I said, and sobbed harder, my voice breaking up between the words. "I don't want to know."

"I'm sorry," he said, and made a few more helpless gestures before leaving.

It took me ten minutes to stop crying again, even inside my house with the doors locked and another cup of coffee turning cold in front of me. It's always easier to start crying than to stop.

"Perhaps I should go," said the woman, standing in the doorway of my pantry. She leaned against the doorframe, pale and gaunt. Like a ghost, except that I don't believe in ghosts. They're as unreal as fairytales and happy endings. "Could I use your shower first?"

"I sent away the man who came looking for you," I said. "You can stay as long as you'd like."

"I need a shower--"

"Upstairs," I said. "Though none of my clothes will fit you. If you give me those, I'll try the laundry again." And I added, because the thought came to me and there was no reason not to say it, "You could probably fit into my husband's clothes, if you don't mind wearing such things."

"When will he be home?" she asked.

"He won't be."

She nodded. She did not ask questions, only walked upstairs, still unsteady on her feet. Not so much so that I feared she'd trip over her own feet on the way up.

I gathered up her clothes from outside the bathroom door, once I heard the pipes clanging with the water for the shower. Then I went out to the old set of rooms where the washing machine waited--where a maid might have lived, if I were the sort of person to have a maid living with me--and did the laundry all over again. At least I hadn't covered her with a load of whites. Some of the bloodstains could be removed, or hidden.

#

At dinner, she ate almost nothing. Her spoon dipped into the soup and out again, coming away with nothing, and she broke the mound of rice across her plate with hardly a bite into her mouth. She said nothing, and I said nothing, and what was there to say?

I took away the dishes, storing the leftovers in the fridge. Maybe I would have those for lunch. And as I was washing the dishes, she said from behind me, "You haven't asked."

The plate in my hands had slipped free, but only into soapy water. I fished it back out. "What should I ask?"

"Who I am. Why they want to kill me. What I've done. Where I meant to go."

"Go ahead and tell me," I said, moving the plate to the other side of the sink, "if you'd like. Or not, if you'd like."

"I don't understand," she said, "why you saved me, or why you sent that killer away again."

"You asked for my help." All the dishes sat in a soapy pot, so I drained the left side of the sink, and moved on to rinse them. "Would you mind drying these? Just lay them out on the counter when you're done."

She took up a towel and began drying the plates I handed her. "My name is Vera," she said. "They want to kill me because--they have always wanted to kill me. It's what they do. They find people like me, and they murder us. I ran away from everything I had every known to try to save myself, and they still came after me. I don't know where to go. I don't know if there is any place in this world that I can run without them finding me."

I passed her the last glass in need of drying. "Would you like a cup of coffee?"

"You aren't listening," she said. "They're coming to kill me. They'll come back here."

"You can stay as long as you like," I said. "You can leave whenever you like. If you mean to go now, I can pack you bag." What did one put in a bag for a terrified woman fleeing mysterious enemies? Clean socks, cash, food. A jacket and flashlight. Perhaps I could bundle her up with everything my husband left behind in the house, and send her away in my car. I had little reason to drive it anywhere, though he'd left me that much.

"You are being _stupid_." She slapped the towel down on the counter beside me as I began to heat water for coffee. "What if they decide you're guilty too, for helping me? What then?"

"I will not live in fear of what might be," I said. "The fear doesn't prevent it from happening. It only steals what happiness you might have had beforehand. I intend to keep what happiness I can, no matter what comes next. If that's stupid, so be it."

"So be it," she said, and sighed. "I will stay the night. When does your maid arrive in the morning?"

"She doesn't. I have no maid." I took out the milk, and set it beside two cups, along with the jar of coffee. "If you stay here, no one will see you except me."

"No human lives all alone," Vera said. "You all need someone else to pretend you matter."

"Yet here I am," I said. "And here you are. How much sugar do you take in your coffee?"

#

I dreamed of being chased by strange men. Of strangers with black wings and fiery swords breaking down my door, sweeping through my house, and dragging away people who didn't live there. My husband, my parents, my grandmother clutching her picture of the uncle I'd never met. Children who had never existed, who clung to my legs and screamed as the men with bloody hands pulled them away into dark trucks in the night.

I woke with an aching head and shaking hands. Vera lay beside me in the bed, atop the covers, still asleep in the dawn light. I let her be and set to doing morning chores.

She didn't appear until one in the afternoon, when I was crouched in the garden, trying to decide how to fix the smashed section of the garden. Rain overnight had already carried away the bloodstains, and hammered broken stems further into the mud.

"He'll return," she said, stopping at the edge of the garden's square. She folded thin arms across her chest, looking down a long nose at me. She would not play the heroine in a telenovela. She would play the wicked fiance of the leading man, aristocratic and spoiled, throwing tantrums over presents and scheming against the sweet-hearted girl of lower class. "What will you do then?"

"I don't know," I said, and snipped through a broken stem with my gardening shears. "Lie, I suppose."

"You should be afraid." She crouched down on the cement, staring at me intently, and the hems of my husband's abandoned coat brushed across the green leaves of the flowers before her. "Why aren't you afraid?"

I sat back on my heels, while sweat trickled down my nose. The bead of sweat ran down my nose, caught at my upper lip, and I swiped it away with my tongue. Salt and dirt. The taste of honest work. "Because I used to be afraid of all sorts of things happening. People dying. People leaving me. To be betrayed, unloved, childless, an object of pity and scorn. And when these things happened, when all my fears came true..." I shrug, and stretch another stem up between my fingers. "They had all come true. But I was still there. So what's there left to be afraid of? Why should I be? Worse could happen, but fearing it won't stop that."

"You're an idiot," Vera said, and swept to her feet. "You don't understand anything."

I half expected that she would be gone when I came back into the house. But she was there. Sitting on the sofa in the parlor, staring into space, and saying nothing. So I let her be and started on dinner.

#

I dreamed of men tearing apart my garden. Fistfuls of flowers in their gloved hands, as they dug down through the mud. We were all sinking in the mud, and I was crying, and they wouldn't stop. I had to stop them, because if they dug any further, they would find where I had buried her. Where she was sleeping, and waiting for me.

She rose from the grave like the first resurrection, flowers in her hands and fire in her eyes, and she said, "You will _not_." Her mouth opened wide, like the jaws of a snake, and she swallowed the men, one after another down her throat. And when she had done, she coiled around me. "Sleep," she said, and that was where the dream ended.

I woke with another headache. Less than the one of the night before. She lay beside me in the bed, fast asleep.

The headache went away with coffee, and I set to work on the morning's chores.

#

When I picked up the basket to go to the store, Vera took my hand, and said, "Don't go. They'll see you. They'll know." So I put the basket back down, and stayed with her another day. 

She was no good at chores, had no sense of what to do unless I told her exactly how to handle a small task, and I did not truly need the help. But she followed me from room to room, always a few minutes after I had moved on to another task. As if it were coincidence that she should choose that doorway in the pantry to lean in, that chair in the parlor to sit in, that patch of shade in the back yard to stand in while I worked in my garden.

At dinner, she ate what I made for her, with no great sign of interest. But the food went into her mouth, she chewed, she swallowed, as if this were another chore that had to be done, and one explained to her slowly by someone who had no idea there might be pleasure to the process.

"I'm out of rice," I told her. "Almost out of potatoes. The milk is gone. I need to buy groceries tomorrow."

"Don't go," she said. "They'll see you."

"Everyone needs to eat, Vera." I cleaned away our plates and took them to the kitchen. "You'd feel better if you ate more. You'll never heal if you pick at your food like that."

She followed me into the kitchen, and put hand to my shoulder. "What if they see you?"

"Then they will see a woman buying groceries," I said. "A woman who needs to eat. Would you like me to bring you back anything in particular from the market?"

She stared at me, as if the staring alone might change my mind. Then she barked out a laugh. "Apples," she said. "If you must."

#

I dreamed of serpents in apple trees. I wandered naked through the orchard, my fingers brushing against the bark of each tree, and on every branch an emerald snake watched me pass.

For a moment I thought I saw my husband ahead. But his image vanished when I turned to look at it, and there was no one there. Only the endless dream of trees, snakes, apples. When one curled down from a branch and offered me a perfect red sphere, the sort that real apples are never like, I accepted it from her coils, but I did not bite.

I woke with a clear head, but made coffee anyway, and set to morning chores before I went to the market.

#

Vera peeled apples for me, her hands deft with the paring knife as her hands were with no other chore I had given her. "I never asked your name," she said, while I fed ingredients for the dough into the mixer. "Impolite of me."

"Malena," I said. There was more to the name, but I no longer enjoyed hearing it.

"Is that short for Magdalena?"

"No." I turned the mixer on, the whir suppressing conversation for a moment. "It's only what it is. I was named after my grandmother."

"Is she still alive?"

"No."

"Is your husband still alive?"

"Yes," I said, and set the mixer going again. She asked no further questions.

We had apple empanadas with dinner, and these at least Vera didn't pick at.

#

When I turned off the lamp beside the bed to sleep, Vera shifted under the sheets in the darkness. "Malena," she said, "what do you want?"

"That's a strange question for bedtime," I said. I lay on my side with my back to her, not out of unfriendliness, but because I had grown very accustomed to lying like this when another person was in the bed. A hard habit to give up on.

"It's a reasonable question. Surely you know what you want."

"I have everything I need," I told her. "A house and a garden. Enough money to continue having both until the end of my days."

"But I didn't ask what you needed," she said. "I asked what you wanted."

"Go to sleep, Vera."

#

I dreamed of a child in my arms, her eyes exactly like mine, who reached up to me and kissed me and called me mother. I dreamed of my grandmother sitting beside me, wiggling fingers in the girl's face and laughing.

When I woke in the morning, there were tears in my eyes. But no matter. I got up, had coffee, began my chores. Vera lay asleep in the bed, hair spread around her like a dark halo once more.

#

We had a routine. It was my routine, the one I carried out alone, except now with a watcher in my shadow. She stood in doorways, sat in chairs, leaned against the bannister on the stairs when I vacuumed the steps. She followed me outside to watch me hang laundry, and when it was dry she unpinned the sheets and shirts to let them drop into my basket.

My grocery shopping didn't change much. She ate so lightly, I bought no more than I would have otherwise, would have wasted on leftovers I couldn't bring myself to eat the next day. None of the recipes I knew quite suited a single person's plate and bowl.

She didn't say much. She didn't tell me anything about the life she had fled, the people who had died around her or the ones who meant to kill her. Every few days, she would ask a story of my life. That was all.

#

I dreamed of thunderstorms, and she was there, wrapping me in her arms, wings like bats or old pictures of devils stretching overhead to keep the rain from me.

I dreamed of children, and she was there, sitting beside me with her hand in mine.

I dreamed of my husband, less often than I used to, and she chased him away, hissing at his pleas, snapping at his heels.

I no longer dreamed of men breaking down the door of the house, of digging in my garden.

#

"I was wondering," Vera said, crouched beside me at the edge of the garden while I pressed dirt down around the roots of a new rosebush, "about your husband."

"Long gone," I said. "And not coming back. No one needs to worry about that."

"You wouldn't," she said wryly. "You fear nothing. I was wondering about your vows. Surely those are broken now that he's gone."

"I am still married in the eyes of God," I said, because it was...simpler. Than trying to explain.

"Did you vow to take no other human to your bed," she asked, "or no other man?"

I sat back on my heels. "Vera--"

"Because these things matter," she said. "How you say things. When you speak the truth."

"Vera," I said, "I am set in my ways, and there are some things in my life that are unlikely to change. Most things in my life."

"Some things have changed," she said. "I'm here. Or did you want me to leave?"

She asked that question like it meant nothing, or like she wanted me to believe it meant nothing, and I found that there were parts of my heart that could still hurt. "You can leave whenever you like," I said. "You can stay as long as you like. I told you so on the first day."

"You never tell me what you want," she said, and stood up. Stalked away as if I had said entirely the wrong thing.

But when I left the garden, she was in the house, making coffee for both of us.

#

I dreamed of the two of us together. We walked through apple orchards, holding hands. Children danced and spun before us, and called us both Mama. Mama, Mamasita, look at me, look at what I found, look at what I can do.

In my dreams, Vera offered me an apple, and said, "What do you want?"

Because it was only a dream, I could answer her.

I woke smiling, some mornings. Some mornings in tears. It didn't matter. Dreams were only dreams, and there were chores to do.

#

On a day like any other day, a morning when I was sweeping the floor in the parlor, the man with the knife came through my front door and found us both there.

Where could she run? I stood in the doorway of the parlor, staring, broom in my hand, like the idiot she had told me I was. He cornered her against the wall, between sofa and china cabinet, and I threw the broom at his back like it would do something. I should have hit him with it. I should have--what, screamed? Called the police?

I had not known until then that I could still be afraid.

"This is none of your business," said the man, one gloved hand at Vera's throat, one hand holding a knife. "Did she make you do it?"

"For the love of God," Vera said, "not in front of her. Please."

"Please," I said to the man. "Don't hurt her. Please. I'll do anything you want, only let her go."

"Never," he said, as if this were a conversation, not even an argument. He turned down my offer as easily as he might turn down sugar for his coffee.

"Malena," Vera said, and I could not understand how she could be so quiet, so calm, when I shook head to toe and could not even cry, "go upstairs, please. You don't want to see this."

"I can't--"

"Go upstairs," she said. "You don't want to see this. You would much rather go upstairs and wait a few minutes."

I walked up the stairs.

Why did I do that? I loved her. And I was so afraid.

#

When I came back downstairs, they were both gone.

#

I dreamed of Vera, dug up in my garden. I dreamed of Vera, dragged away in the night. I dreamed of her eyes, her voice, her hands, the whisper of the wings she only had in the secret dreams of the night, and always the men broke in and took her away while our children screamed.

I dreamed of a man of shadows, black wings and black gloves and chains all around him, who stood before me and said, "She used you. It's not your fault. Be at peace." And the world melted around us into fields and flowers, waterfalls and music and no, I would not _let_ him, I would not let him lie to me. I was back in the dreams of them taking her away, and our children screaming.

I woke up every morning with tears and a headache.

But I wasn't afraid. There was nothing to be afraid of, all over again. The worst had happened.

#

A year passed.

And someone knocked on my door.

A woman stood there. Bony wrists and bony arms, her hair golden as the sun, her eyes the eyes of my dreams. A face I had never seen before. She offered me an apple.

"Don't worry," she said. "They'll never know."

I opened the door, and let Vera in.


End file.
